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Self-Destruction in the Promised Land by Howard I. Kushner (review)
- Canadian Review of American Studies
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 21, Number 3, Winter 1990
- pp. 413-416
- Review
- Additional Information
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Shorter Book Reviews 413 requirements and the peculiar nature" of a specific game (17). Why did the New York style of playing baseball become more widespread than the Massachusetts or other styles? Kirsch says it was in large part because the New York rules created a form of baseball which participants could easily learn, which spectators could clearly see, and which provided "more action, more base runners, and hence more tension and drama" than other forms (71). Why did baseball become more popular than cricket? Because cricket was "controlled by an immigrant community that used it in part to preserve its own ethnic identity" (97), because a baseball game could be completed in much less time than a cricket match, because excellent field conditions were less crucial in baseball than in cricket, and because in baseball each player was involved frequently in the action, whereas in cricket "two men could stand at their wickets" for hours without hitting a ball "solidly,"leaving most of the fielders with nothing to do (101). Kirsch has a clear and attractive style, except for occasional lapses. He uses inappropriate active verbs with the nouns "cricket" and "baseball," so that the reader is surprised to learn, for example, that cricket "tended to withdraw from the masses" (196). Also, when Kirsch provides lists of "changes" (3) or "forces" (94), either the construction is clumsy or the items in each list are not mutually exclusive. Finally, sometimes he unskillfullybreaks into his narrative to mention that this or that way of doing things should be labelled "premodern" or "modern." . Despite the awkward passages found here and there, this book will be interesting and informative to anyone who wants a thoughtful summary of important mid-nineteenth developments in American sports, and of the ways in which these developments related to wider trends. MorrisMott Department of History Brandon University Howard I. Kushner. Self-Destrnction in the Promised Land. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. xvii + 284 pp. Howard Kushner's Self-Destncction in the Promised Land is an important and timely contribution to current debate on suicide, combining admirable research with interesting and perceptive synthesis. Discussion of suicide, 414 Shorter Book Reviews particularly of suicide among teenagers and the elderly, is now extensive. Media coverage of euthanatic suicide and pending legislation on euthanasia support Margaret Battin's contention that elective death will "replace abortion as the social issue." Kushner tackles a fundamental question: given similar circumstances, why do some people commit suicide and others not? In the first of the book's three parts, Kushner reviews the history of changing conceptions of, and attitudes toward, suicide; in the second, he offers psychoanalytic, sociological and biochemical material, and an interpretive synthesis of some of that material; an epilogue applies this synthesis to the Jonestown mass suicide. The historical review is extemely useful: Kushner traces the change from suicide construed as felonious submission to Satanic influence, through suicide as pathological, to suicide as a consequence of environmental and social factors. This survey reveals such things as how the growth of psychiatry as an institutional practice (i.e., as asylum treatment) focused attention on environmental causes of suicide, and how it prompted diverse therapies which ran the gamut from edifying talk to shock treatment. The surveythen highlights how institutional psychiatric practices in the conception and treatment of suicide met with competition from increasingly important work in sociology and psychoanalysis, which tended largely to emphasize cultural and educational causes. Kushner also puts some stress on the work of neurologists and neuropsychiatrists, which brought a much more exact level of analysis and diagnosis to consideration of suicide. This stress is understandable, given Kushner's positive efforts to integrate neurological and biochemical factors into the conception and asessment of suicide. The more-or-less empirical part of his treatment of suicide includes intriguing charts and statistics showing, for instance, that there is a consistent two-to-one preference for firearms among males and roughly the same preference for poison (mainly drug-overdosage) among females (106). It is also interesting to learn that Denmark and Switzerland have roughly four times as many suicides as Ireland and Italy. Clearly, religious backgrounds play a crucial part here...